A. van Aelst Majapahit picis; The currency of a 'moneyless' society 1300-1700 In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 151 (1995), no: 3, Leiden, 357-393 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:45:21AM via free access ARJAN VAN AELST Majapahit Picis The Currency of a 'Moneyless' Society 1300-1700' During the 14th and 15th centuries Java was the heartland of the empire of Majapahit, exercising cultural and economie influence to as far as northern Sumatra and Borneo. Yet there seems to be no legacy, either in written texts or in archaeological remains, of an indigenous Majapahit coinage. Is it possible that such an empire functioned without a coinage of its own? The degree to which the Javanese were familiar with the use of coins prior to the arrival of Europeans around 1600 is a matter of debate. Viewing this debate as a spectrum with two extremes, we have at the one end the assumption that the Javanese were not familiar with the use of money until the Europeans started to exercise an influence. At the other end there is the notion that imported or copied coins fulfilled a role in the Javanese economy from the llth century onwards. In between there are different permutations of these viewpoints and, although the different views may occur side by side, if put along a chronological line, the 'moneyless' view is seen to be the oldest (Bakker 1936:1-17). This discussion forms part of the larger debate about whether non- Western economies developed along a line similar to that in Western societies or whether, on the contrary, they reached an economie dead-end from which they could only be rescued by foreign efforts (Elvin 1973:315; Perlin 1987:131-6). Since there is very little written information available on the use of money in Java, it is possible for scholars to see only what they expect to see. This expectation in turn is largely determined by an implicit ideological point of departure. If for the sake of contrast we overstate these positions, the 'colonial' assumption is that Asians were too irrational or had too little economie sense to develop a monetary system of 1 The author is grateful for the comments on earlier versions of this paper by Professors Peter W. Klein and Peter Boomgaard, and by Arent Pol and W. Op den Velde. ARJAN VAN AELST is a librarian at the university library in Rotterdam who obtained his M.A. in history at the Erasmus University. Specializing in the economie history of East and Southeast Asia, he has previously published 'Lucifers en kramerijen; De Japanse entree op de Indonesische afzetmarkt, 1895-1913', Economisch en Sociaal Historisch Jaarboek, 1990. Drs. van Aelst may be contacted at the University Library, Erasmus University, Rotterdam. BKI 151-IH (1995) Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:45:21AM via free access 358 A rjan van A eist their own and needed the wise guidance of Europeans to be able to escape from stasis. The 'neo-Marxist' thesis, on the other hand, is that pristine indigenous societies were contaminated by foreign money use and thus forced into underdevelopment. A third position that might be expected is the 'decolonized' viewpoint of Asian historians assuming that their 'own' cultures developed along lines more or less similar to those elsewhere until foreign influences turned everything upside-down. In a word: the Javan- ese had no coins because they were too silly, the Javanese were lucky enough to have no coins, or the Javanese probably always had coins. If we want to escape from these entrenched views we will have to find more evidence. We might find this evidence by turning to the rapidly developing discipline of numismatics. Numismatists, after all, are concerned with the coins themselves as a source of information and in recent years have been trying to bridge the gap between their discipline and economie history (Ehrenkreutz 1976:207-18). Perhaps their theories, tools and findings can help us in the case of Java. But first we will have to assess the direction of our investigation by taking a bird's-eye view of the histori- ographical developments with respect to Java, and highlighting the most prominent views on money in Java. Then we will be able to use those numismatic instruments that are relevant to our problem. Historiography with reference to Java Studies on Southeast Asian history over the years have tended to be geographically fragmented, focusing either on colonial history or on the past of the various new nations. Before World War II the attention was divided between archaeologists and epigraphers studying the early period on the one hand and European historians studying the post-1600 activities of the colonizers on the other. After the war the main change was a shift in attention to 19th- and 20th-century developments. In general there was an emphasis on external influences and less attention for the internal dy- namics of Southeast Asian societies (Legge 1992:1-22). These short- comings were observed with regard to Java as well by J.C. van Leur. He criticized the subdivision of Javanese history into periods labelled by reference to external influences: a Hindu period, an Islamic period and a European period. This prevented scholars gaining an understanding of autonomous developments - an effect that was reinforced by the fact that each period was studied by the separate disciplines of archaeology, philology and history. The fragmentation and lack of multi-disciplinary cooperation put obstacles in the way of the Indo-centric approach which Van Leur advocated. He proposed, aside from a broadening of the range of sources and lengthening of the time span to be considered, a geo- graphically wider approach. Not just Java, but the archipelago as a whole, with its links with Indian, Chinese and Japanese history, should be the object of investigation (Vogel 1992:224-5). Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:45:21AM via free access Majapahit Picis 359 Such a concerted effort has not yet been made, at least not as far as the pre-1600 Javanese economy is concerned. The situation might even be considered to have deteriorated since Van Leur, as there is now question not only of a fragmented field with different specialists working with dif- ferent sources, but also of separately operating groups of theoretically oriented social scientists and historians. Lack of communication between specialists and generalists has prevented the interpretation of micro- evidence within broader frameworks, as much as it has prevented the frameworks' being adapted to new evidence (Wisseman Christie 1986:86). If we take these points into consideration when investigating the money of Majapahit, we will have to adopt the broad perspective: a long time span (stretching from before to after Majapahit), a wider geographical scope than just Java (Indonesia and the rim of the South China Sea), and a broader range of disciplines, encompassing archaeology, epigraphy, numis- matics and history. Views on Javanese money In the most detailed study on Majapahit we read: 'probably in the 14th century Majapahit realm, especially in the inland districts, barter was still employed. The currency of the realm was Chinese cash, ... imported from China in bulk' (Pigeaud 1962:499). Apart from that, very little attention has been given to these foreign coins, as if these imports were without any consequence. The one scholar who did consider them mentioned only the negative effects, saying 'they contribute little to our understanding of local coin developments', their presence in Java only being suspected of having prevented the development of an indigenous coinage (Wicks 1983:xviii). Quite independently of these views on earlier developments, it is assumed that imported coins from China allowed Chinese traders to gain a foothold in the local pepper trade in 17th-century West Java. 'Local dealings gradually became monetarized and Bantanese in all walks of life had to learn how to count in picis', the imported coins being considered 'the gate in the walls of Java's subsistence economy, which lacked a coinage of its own' (Blussé 1979:36-7). This monetary innovation by Chinese residents would then have been helped along further by currency measures intro- duced by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), though only to relieve the local monetary problems of the Chinese traders in West Java (Klein 1991:425). These views clearly reflect the general assumption that monet- ization in the area was relatively late and induced by foreign forces. This is rather difficult to reconcile with information on gold and silver coinage in 8th- to 13th-century Java and the early 14th-century transition to Chinese copper coins. Again the question arises whether the use of these foreign coins was stimulated by external factors, such as the Mongol invasion of Java in 1293 and the Yongle expeditions of 1425-1435 (Reid 1993:96), or whether it gradually spread as a result of trade contacts from Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:45:21AM via free access 360 Arjan van Aelst 1200 onwards (Wicks 1993:284, 291). There is mention of 'local coins modelled on the Chinese cash' and of 'Chinese cash replicated locally to maintain supply' (Reid 1993:95-7; Thierry 1992:30). These matters regret- tably are only hinted at, and we still lack the archaeological and numis- matic evidence that allows us to follow the relevant developments through time. Is there anything that allows us to fill in the 'monetary gap' between the use of gold and silver coins before the 13th century and that of picis in the 17th century? If so, numismatics will have to supply the necessary materials.